Tuesday, December 24, 2013

To this day, Jordan Farmar is not entirely sure the call really happened. It was early, and he was still emotionally spent from the excitement of the day before. The Los Angeles Lakers, the team he'd grown up rooting for as a boy in the San Fernando Valley, had made him the 26th pick of the 2006 NBA draft, and now, first thing the next morning, his phone was ringing and Kobe Bryant was on the other line?

"I thought I was dreaming still, to be honest with you," Farmar said. "I woke up early in the morning, the phone rang and he's like, 'What's up man? It's Kobe. Welcome to the Lakers. Are you ready to get to work?'"

As introductions go, it was about as straightforward as they come. Had he been fully awake and alert, everything Farmar needed to know about playing with Bryant and the Lakers was embedded within that early-morning phone call.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Facebook Inc. (FB), is selling shares to help pay taxes, joining the company and some other shareholders in an offering worth about $3.9 billion.

About 27 million shares will be offered by Facebook, and almost 43 million shares are being sold by certain stockholders, including 41,350,000 shares by Zuckerberg, the company said in a statement today. Menlo Park, California-based Facebook fell as much as 5.3 percent in pre-market trading.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

This is an incredibly long read but to parents, athletes, coaches it is very insightful. Please review the entire article.The development path to excellence in anything is filled with moments of great reward; but challenge, disappointment, and frustration are also frequent companions on the road. While that sounds demotivating, and perhaps an article about growth and development shouldn’t be so blunt, this truth cannot be hidden or ignored. Ignoring reality doesn’t make it different, and naivety almost always impairs anyone’s ability to navigate complex situations.

Monday, December 16, 2013

NEW YORK — Instagram has added a new feature that lets users share photos and videos with no more than 15 people rather than everyone who follows them on the popular Facebook-owned photo-sharing app.

Called Instagram Direct, the feature is available for Apple and Android phones, CEO Kevin Systrom said at a news event in New York City. Users can choose up to 15 people who follow them on Instagram to share photos or videos.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Twitter reversed course on changes to its blocking functionality that many users complained would leave the service more prone to abuse.

When a user blocks someone on Twitter, it prevents them from following or messaging that user, as well as add that account to their lists.

A change introduced yesterday by Twitter would have turned block into essentially a mute button, where users could remove their tweets from their Timeline, but the blocked user could still follow that user and reply to messages.

Facebook announced an algorithm change last week that has dramatically impacted the content consumed online and on mobile devices (disclosure: I own shares of Facebook). While 30% of Americans find news on Facebook, an astonishing 78% of those Americans discover stories while on the site for other reasons. The significance of a change in the algorithms that determine how 23% of Americans (78% x 30%) find news has had a dramatic impact on content consumption. The impact of these changes was published in BuzzFeed two weeks before Facebook announced its algorithm update. Facebook referral traffic to the BuzzFeed Partner Network, which includes over 200 media sites and 300 million users, was up from 100 million referrals in August to 151 million referrals in October – a 69% increase in 2 months.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Twitter has reversed a controversial policy change announced Thursday that would let a user block others on Twitter, but the blocked people could still continue to follow and see the user’s tweets and interact with them.

”We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users—we never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe,” wrote Michael Sippey, Twitter’s vice president of product, in a blog post.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Is time quantized?

John Baez is a member of the mathematics faculty at the University of California at Riverside and one of the moderators of the on-line sci.physics.research newsgroup. He responds:

"The brief answer to this question is, 'Nobody knows.' Certainly there is no experimental evidence in favor of such a minimal unit. On the other hand, there is no evidence against it, except that we have not yet found it. There are no well-worked-out physics theories incorporating a fundamental unit of time, and there are substantial obstacles to doing so in a way that is compatible with the principles of General Relativity. Recent work on a theory of quantum gravity in which gravity is represented using loops in space suggests that there might be a way to do something roughly along these lines--not involving a minimum unit of time but rather a minimum amount of area for any two-dimensional surface, a minimum volume for any three-dimensional region in space and perhaps also a minimum 'hypervolume' for any four-dimensional region of space-time."